


Vicarious Colors

by Silex



Category: DC Animated Universe (Timmverse)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Insanity, Stream of Consciousness, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 13:39:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16409492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: It's all about the masks, they're what reveal the truth. People can smile and lie about who they are, but once they put on a mask every word, every action is the truth of who they are.





	Vicarious Colors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



Autumn had always been his favorite time of the year when he was a young boy. Seeing not just the trees, but the sky itself change colors as the days grew shorter. Red apples in the orchards and bright orange pumpkins in the fields. It was a magical time of year, full of color and excitement.

And the costumes! Oh the costumes and the masks.

The wonderful masks.

Even then, watching his fellow children, and himself of course, run around as imagined monsters, venturing boldly out into the wild and windy darkness of the October night, demanding, threatening, and getting rewarded for it.

The next day masks and monsters would be gone, he and the others would be well behaved children once more, but it sparked in him a lifelong interest.

When they wore the masks, ran around in costume they were unafraid.

Was it because of the safety of anonymity?

No, of course not, for they’d spent the whole previous month bragging about what they would be dressed as. Everyone would know who that witch with her crooked rubber nose really was, the muslin wrapped mummy, the wax-fanged vampire.

Half the fun was the anticipation, the seeking out your friends in their masks and being amazed by the transformation.

But you always knew who they were.

Who you were.

And that was where the idea came to him, that when you put on a mask you weren’t hiding who yourself, you were, safely, showing your true self.

The person you were too afraid to show the world.

It was a theory he’d refined countless times.

Especially after moving the city to work as a professor of psychology at Gotham University.

That was where he found further proof of his theory.

Watching masked madmen, surrounded by people who spoke in awed, reverent tones as one of them ran through the night doing what they were afraid to do.

The masks and the fear of the truth were connected.

That was what he sought to better understand with his experiments.

Criminals were criminal whether they wore a mask or not, but wearing masks facilitated the committing of those crimes.

What made some people decide to pick up masks and show the world their true nature, freeing themselves of fear?

And what made others never do so, no matter how much they wanted to?

It wasn’t uncommon for professors to enlist students for help with their pet projects, he was hardly unusual in that.

Maybe he pushed too hard, but they were young enough that they were still malleable, the point where their fears could lead to truth.

Why were they afraid, what were they afraid of?

That was what he was looking for.

Interestingly enough, before it was all brought to an end by shortsighted fools, he found something most interesting. When fears resulted from trauma the phobias that manifested weren’t always related to the initial incident.

It was a new layer of the masks that people created.

Masking fear to make it more palatable rather than facing it in its raw, primal form.

So he’d made a mask for himself and continued his studies in a wider test group, a more interesting test group.

And thus brought himself up against a man who was a thesis in and of himself.

Batman was fascinating, not just as a foe to try and overcome, but a puzzle to try and solve.

This was a man who had embraced his true self, yet acted so differently than all the others, as though there was some nobler purpose to what he did. Was his self-deception so great that even wearing a mask he was able to embrace lies or was there more to it?

There was a lying face hidden behind the truth of the mask, but who was he and what did he hope to accomplish? Would learning the face yield answers or give rise to more questions?

Again and again he tried to discover what kept the Batman up at night, chasing criminals through the streets when all respectable people were sleeping scared in their homes, windows and doors locked against real and imagined terrors.

Terrors he brought to life.

He and others.

They were fascinating case studies as well, and in his dealings with them he came up with his theories.

Theories he wisely kept to himself.

It was prudence, not fear for when dealing with people who wore masks of one form or another you had to be careful. They would act on impulses that the maskless masses were too fearful to acknowledge.

A whole city to study, a truly random test group.

But there was no control.

Batman was a constant, but an unknown at the same time.

Was it so strange that he became his own test subject from time to time?

When he wore the mask there was little to fear, and he’d been hoist by his own petard enough, exposed to his own fear toxins.

Gotham was a gray and dreary city, summer giving way to fall without fanfare, blending in monotones to the cold gloom of winter.

It was the masked characters that gave it color.

And on occasion their antics took on a festive feel.

Was it so unusual that there were times he got caught up in it as well?

Except there was a downside to his masked doings.

Not the consequences of being caught. Learned as he was in psychology he knew the right answers to the right questions, the near magical words to convince well-meaning individuals of wellness and sanity.

Because he was fundamentally sane, more so than any of the maskless individuals treating him.

They were the ones repressed, in denial, while he was embracing the truth.

The reason recidivism was so high, especially amongst those select individuals, despite the treatment by the best and brightest, was because there was nothing to treat.

Was it any wonder that they occasionally managed to bring those treating them into their way of thinking?

And Batman was just another example of it, for he didn’t act alone.

There were at least two others, one just a boy, likely taught by the Batman himself, another a young woman, unrelated, but perhaps inspired by his actions. A shared purpose, or perhaps a shared mania?

It was a strong theory, but one where he lacked proof, a control, but by its very nature fear was uncontrollable.

The answer then was to remove it.

The absence of fear would be the metric by which he measured things.

For what else should it be?

Masked and fearless versus maskless and fearful.

Having studied fear for so long, becoming an expert in inflicting it in all its myriad forms, creating a compound to remove it was child’s play.

And there was where he found the downside.

When he tested the new formula on himself.

Fear made everything, sharper, the colors, the other emotions, everything.

His old costume and mask, once a reflection of himself felt false and deceitful. It was no longer the person he was. It had been terrifying once, he was sure, inspiring in others the fear that he had managed to overcome, but he couldn’t see it.

So he made himself a new costume, a new mask, a new self.

Fearless and colorless and terrifying.

Watching others he could remember what it was to feel fear.

To feel.

And in their screams he remembered the colors of fall.

The delighted shrieks of children discovering their true selves on a single October night.

That moment of discovery and understanding he sought so hard to recapture.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, the prompt that inspired this brought back all of the nostalgia for me. Batman: The Animated Series wasn't my favorite show growing up, but it was easily one of the most influential.


End file.
